by Jack Dann
Nicholas looked at Anna expectantly. ‘I don’t know him,’ she said.
‘Don’t be so sure,’ he warned. ‘People are not always as you would expect to see them in dreams. They can take on forms that express their inner selves, or some aspect of it.’
But Anna shook her head. ‘The only man who is close to me is David and that child could not have been him. David grew up in England in a village. He told me that his father was a history professor at Oxford.’
‘Let us try another house,’ Nicholas said.
They did and to Anna’s amazement, the same boy answered the door. ‘We need to speak urgently with your parents,’ Nicholas said firmly.
‘They’re out at work and I’m not supposed to let anyone in,’ said the boy, but less aggressively than before.
‘What does your father do?’ Nicholas asked. ‘Perhaps we could visit his place of work.’
The boy glared at him and suddenly there was a pit bull pressing at the security door. ‘Go away or I’ll let Ghengis Khan out.’
Anna gave a start and Nicholas gave her a swift, searching look. ‘It is David,’ she whispered. ‘He told me once that when he was a child, he had a dog called Khan.’
‘David?’ Nicholas addressed the boy.
‘That’s my middle name,’ the boy said suspiciously. ‘How did you know? Did my dad send you?’
‘David, do you know a woman called Anna?’
The boy recoiled and all at once he was not a boy but a middle-aged man with thinning blond hair and a paunch. Anna was shocked to see that it was David, but a much older and coarser David than she had known. ‘Anna’s dead or as near as makes no difference,’ he said in a surly voice half-slurred with drinking. ‘It warn’t my fault. I couldn’t help how things came out. I had a plan and then I fell in love. How could I have expected that? And a lot of good it did me. I ended up with nothing.’ The man stepped back and slammed the door closed.
‘I don’t understand,’ Anna said.
Nicholas only took her elbow and led her back to the street and along it. ‘Let us find somewhere to sit and talk. Do you feel hungry? Hunger is an illusion of course, but eating is always pleasant, I find.’ Anna let him lead her out of the housing estate and back along the road towards the mist that hid her cottage. Once within it, the smell of the sea was very strong, and Anna felt a powerful longing to wake and walk on the beach. Perhaps she had projected the thought, because instead of leading her up the path to the house, he guided her down the path through the bushes that edged the road, to the little beach that she had visited so often. Nicholas bade her close her eyes and imagine a picnic she had enjoyed.
Somewhat bemused, Anna obeyed, imagining the picnic her father had prepared for her twelfth birthday. It had been a month after her mother died, and she had been allowed to ask Leaf. Her father had got a restaurant to prepare the food and it had been delicious.
‘Perfect,’ said Nicholas and Anna opened her eyes to find exactly this picnic spread out on an eggshell blue cloth. It was still misty but the air was warm and sweetly scented by the little purple flowers that grew along the track leading from the road to the beach. Nicholas sat and drew her down beside him, lamenting the single wine glass.
‘It was my father’s. I was a child,’ Anna said.
‘We will share it,’ Nicholas suggested, and he uncorked the bottle deftly, poured some of the ruby dark wine into the glass and offered it to her. She sipped a mouthful, looking at him over the rim of the glass. Then as she passed it to him, she asked him why he was helping her. He took a long drink and then he said gently, ‘Long dreamers are always searching for other long dreamers.’
‘Why?’ Anna asked taking the peach he had given her and absently smoothing the down.
‘In part, for the solidity of their dreamplaces. But also out of loneliness. It is impossible to form any sort of relationship with an ordinary dreamer. Even lucid dreamers can only communicate until they wake. So we search for others of our kind. Of course even a long dreamer can wake, or retreat into the void. Or …’ He stopped abruptly.
‘Or die?’ Anna concluded softly.
He turned his face towards the invisible waves.
Anna was silent a while, then she said gently, ‘I understand what you are saying, Nicholas, and I am sorry for your loneliness. But I have to tell you that I mean to wake as soon as I can figure out how. Don’t you want to wake?’
He gave her a strange look. ‘There are wonders here that you could not imagine in your wildest dreams, Anna. I have seen a mountain of glass that shines like a diamond in the sun, and there is a white sea so vast I think it must be God’s dream. And you can change things. You can use the stuff of dreams to build anything. You can change yourself.’ He looked at Anna and saw her expression. ‘What is it?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I had the feeling that I had heard you say that before. Can you have déjà vu in a dream?’
‘You can have anything in a dream,’ Nicholas said.
‘I can’t have my life,’ Anna told him.
‘Life is only another kind of dream,’ Nicholas said, but he spoke softly, as if to himself.
They finished their picnic meal in silence, and then Anna stood up and said resolutely that she wanted to try visiting the desert. ‘I need to know what happened to me. I need to understand the things David said in his dream.’
‘The words he said may not mean what they seem to mean,’ Nicholas said, as he rose too.
‘They mean something,’ Anna said determinedly.
They went up the leafy path to the road, but instead of coming to the road and seeing the mist swathed cottage on the other side, they were standing on the rim or the desert they had seen from the top of the hill.
‘Any idea of whose dream this might be?’
Anna shook her head. ‘No one I know is like a desert.’
He shrugged and set off across the desert. ‘Perhaps, then, this is an unknown face of someone you know.’
They had walked for several hours when Anna noticed trees rising above a bare dune in the distance. It was an oasis! She set off towards it, the sand slipping away under her feet. They ran for a long time tirelessly, but also without getting any closer to the oasis. Finally Nicholas stopped. ‘It is a mirage.’
Anna said nothing, for now she had seen a woman dragging herself up the shifting face of a dune with painful slowness. Anna noticed with horror that the woman’s hands were covered with blood. Nicholas laid a hand on her shoulder as she would have reached out to help the woman. ‘Be careful. If you touch her and she is the dreamer, she will very likely wake. Try talking to her.’
Anna nodded. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.
The woman turned to look at her and Anna was astounded to see that it was Izabel, but not the elegant, sophisticated Izabel of the real world. Her face had been burnt to a terrible blazing red, and her eyes looked out in staring madness. Her lips were cracked and bleeding as if she had chewed them, and her hair was so filthy it looked grey brown instead of red. But all at once the madness faded in the wild eyes.
‘Anna?’ Izabel rasped, and her face twisted in a ghastly mingling of despair and rage. ‘I never meant you any harm. I swear it. It was all his idea. He said you were soft and that it would be easy to gull you. But then he changed. He said he had not meant to fall in love but that it changed everything. He told me that he would give me money, but it was never the money I wanted. I never meant you any harm. I just couldn’t see straight I was so jealous. I lost control.’
The desert began to tremble and a great terror flowed through Anna. She tried to stand but the ground was shuddering violently. She turned and saw Nicholas reaching out to her. Instinctively, she threw out her own hand, but it was too late. The world dissolved into the squeal of tyres and the grinding shriek of metal. Then there was a bone-crunching impact and terrible, excruciating pain. Then silence.
Anna woke.
She was lying in her bed in a rumpled tangle of
sheets. She thought with bewilderment of the vividness of the dreams within dreams she had experienced and thought it was no wonder the bed was a mess. ‘At least I know that when you hit the ground in a falling dream, you do wake up,’ she muttered. She turned to find David was not in bed. ‘Déjà vu,’ she said. ‘Déjà vu squared.’
She sat up and rubbed her face, remembering the bird smashing into the glass, and the one that had swooped her on the hilltop. Warnings from her undermind, the dream man had named them. Anna’s thoughts shifted to the dream Izabel in the desert. She had not named David, and yet it was David she had been referring to. Then there had been David before that, saying that he had a plan, and that he had not expected to fall in love.
All of it had been a dream, and yet Leaf always said dreams contained messages from the subconscious. And so, what was she being told? Anna thought of Izabel in her peacock coat, introducing David. How beautiful she had looked that day. Anna had taken it for the glow of pleasure at her exhibition, but in fact nothing had sold that night, nor in the weeks that followed. Normally that would have enraged Izabel, but in fact she had dismissed the failure of the show lightly, saying that the next one would have the proper gallery and pre-publicity. It had not occurred to Anna to wonder what she meant.
What had the plan been then? David was to marry Anna, and after a time, divorce her? Izabel had known her well enough to realise she would not contest a reasonable claim; especially if they had come to her and confessed to falling in love. She would have accepted it as the natural fate of a plain woman. Then Izabel and David would have money and one another. Except that according to Izabel, David had fallen in love with her.
Anna heard the sound of crockery in the kitchen, and wondered if she had the courage to go in and confront him. After all she had no evidence. But if David had fallen in love with her, perhaps it did not truly matter that he had begun by pretending love. Except that it did. In that moment, Anna understood that loving David had been more a matter of loving someone who could love her. Anna got up slowly and drew on her kimono. She was trembling and her whole body ached as if she really had fallen from a great height. Entering the kitchen, she said, ‘I had the strangest dream last night…’
She stopped, for the man making coffee was not David but Nicholas. The room swayed and shimmered but Nicholas leapt across the room and took both of her hands in his. ‘Look into my eyes, Anna. Look into them and stay. Don’t retreat.’
Slowly the shimmering faded and the room lost its strange radiance. Anna looked down at Nicholas’ hands, clasped so tightly about hers that his fingers were white. A sense of déjà vu washed over her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, loosening his grip. ‘Are you all right?’
‘How long has this been going on?’ Anna whispered, looking up into his dark eyes.
His expression grew very still, his eyes watchful. Then he breathed out slowly. ‘Countless times, but you have never got so far before. Last time you retreated after confronting Izabel.’
‘Was it always the same? The other times?’
He shook his head. ‘Last time it was a jungle for Izabel, and David was working in one of the factories with his father.’
‘He married me because of the money. Izabel loved him and he wanted the money so they deceived me. Then he fell in love with me …’ She sat down at the kitchen bench and Nicholas set a cup of coffee before her.
‘I hope I have done it well enough. The implements here are unfamiliar to me.’
Anna took the coffee. Then something occurred to her. ‘How did you come in here? I thought you couldn’t unless I invited you.’
‘You screamed my name as the desert dream broke,’ Nicholas said. ‘It allowed me to bind myself to you.’
‘But what if I had retreated into the void? I could have, couldn’t I?’
He nodded. ‘You could but…’ He shrugged.
Anna nodded, but she was thinking of the blood on Izabel’s hands, and the screech of tyres and the sound of grinding metal. The broken glass when the bird had hit the window. ‘I think there was an accident,’ she said softly. ‘I think I was in a car with Izabel and something went wrong. Maybe David had told her he would not leave me. She said she lost control.’ She shivered and wondered if they were both in a hospital; Izabel in an ordinary room and she in a special ward for comatose patients. Maybe David was sitting beside her, holding her hand, longing for her to wake.
She rose and went to the window, noticing that day had turned suddenly to night. The mist had thinned to veils of gauze and beyond them, the sea shimmered and glittered in the light of a full moon. ‘Does night come here, then?’ she asked.
‘Night and day; winter, summer, autumn and spring; full moon and high noon. But they might not come when you expect and they are more often reflections of a dreamer’s mood than of the natural state of the world,’ he answered.
‘Thank you for helping me,’ she murmured.
‘Thank you for giving me purpose,’ Nicholas said. ‘It is more precious than you can know.’ He lifted her hand and kissed it.
‘I need to go to the city,’ Anna said.
The city was no ordinary city. As they walked along the road towards it, Anna saw that the skyscrapers were actually ruins wound about with some sort of leafy creeper, and what she had taken for roads were actually long stretches of dark lawn broken here and there by moon-sheened pones and shimmering silver streams. Night blooming lilies grew in great clumps, filling the air with a heavy languorous perfume, but even as they moved through the city towards what Anna sensed was its heart, the sky began to lighten towards dawn and birds began to sing.
‘This is beautiful,’ Anna said.
‘We have not been here before but … it is strangely coherent,’ he said, answering her unvoiced question. ‘Dreams are not usually so,’ he added. As they moved deeper into the strange city, the sky turned pink and gradually the light increased until it was a rich beautiful dawn. Then Nicholas pointed down the street to a grassy intersection where there was an immense marble fountain. Sitting on the edge of it bathing her feet was an enormous green skinned woman with flowing yellow hair. Squirrels and birds were perched fearlessly on her shoulders. Then the giant woman turned her face and Anna saw it clearly.
‘Leaf,’ she said softly.
The giant woman’s eyes widened as her mouth curved into a smile of delight. ‘I am so happy to see you, Anna,’ Leaf said. ‘I always believed I would, one day.’
‘You are a lucid dreamer?’ Nicholas said.
The goddess Leaf nodded. ‘I meditate before I sleep.’ She seemed to look at him more closely before asking, ‘What is your name?’ He told her adding that, like Anna, he was a long sleeper.
‘Tell me about David,’ Anna said.
Leaf sighed, ‘Poor David. One can’t help pitying him for in the end he really lost everything. I have not seen him for a long time, but the last I heard, he was living in a unit somewhere on one of the new housing estates. Izabel begged him to come and see her, but he refused. I suppose it was shame.’
‘You know about them?’ Anna asked.
‘Izabel told me the night of the accident. I truly believe it was an accident though she lied about you driving, of course. The police worked that out almost at once and then she had that terrible trial. The prosecutor was very savage with her. She would have gone to prison, I believe, if she had not had a breakdown. She never did recover completely, though she does have good periods, and the money you left between us enabled me to engage a nurse to take care of her. After I heard what Izabel had to say, I did not think you would wish me to produce the will you made leaving everything to David. I took Izabel some herbal medicines and offered to open her chakra a while back, but she was never very receptive to such things.’ She looked at Anna, and her expression became very serious. ‘I hope that you do not trouble yourself about David. He was never worthy of you, my dear. I knew it when he came to tell me that he was falling in love with me not a month after I met him.’
‘You!’ Anna stared at her, and then she began to laugh. ‘Of course he loved you! Who wouldn’t?’
Leaf laughed, too. ‘Quite a lot of people, actually.’ Her smile faded. ‘I did pity him of course. One could not help it. But his aura was so yellow, my dear. That is always the colour of spiritual weakness.’
‘His aura?’
Leaf nodded, blond curls tumbling. ‘I see them, you see. I always have. Yours is a lovely shade of violet with streaks of gold and the tiniest bit of green. Much prettier than the muddy brown and mauve aura you had before.’ She beamed at Anna.
‘What about Nicholas?’ Anna asked shyly.
Leaf looked at Nicholas, whose skin was so white against his black clothes and hair. ‘You must tell her, young man. There can be nothing real without truth.’
Anna looked at them in bewilderment. ‘Tell me what?’
Nicholas sighed and nodded, glancing out the window to where the last vestiges of the mist were vanishing. ‘I swore that I would tell you, if ever you became fully lucid. I have waited long for this moment and now that it has come, I fear it. You asked who I was and I told you Nicholas. I gave myself that name because I have no memory of anyone giving me a name in the real world. I can only suppose from this that I fell into a coma soon after I was born. I do not know why my parents kept me alive, nor how long I lived, for as I told you, time flows unevenly. But I think they must have kept me a very long time, and that this is why I did not vanish here, when my body died. I knew it had happened because my dream place vanished and I fell to the void. I had been there before and I knew it was difficult for a long dreamer to get free of it, but now I learned that without flesh, it was virtually impossible. I do not know why I fought so hard and so long to escape, but at last after eons of nightmare, I found my way back here to the dreamscape. I vowed never to fall to the void again, for I knew that it was a miracle I had escaped, and I would not manage it a second time.’
‘But you … you stayed with me when my dream broke,’ Anna said.
